Programming in Haskell

Not really a review, just a strong recommendation… Graham Hutton’s Programming in Haskell is published mid January 2007, but Cambridge University Press are shipping already — I got mine just before Christmas and wish I had it earlier… It is by far the best introduction to Haskell I’ve seen, at least for someone new to functional programming such as myself. The chapters on parsing and and IO are a good mark of the book, together clearly yet stealthily introducing monadic programming in an easily digestible form. Well this book has plenty of other aspects I could praise, but like I say this isn’t a review, just go read and enjoy it yourself.

It’s great to read a really clear, concise text book, I could almost feel my brain re-organising itself while I read it. The experience reminded me of reading K & R after some months of confused C hacking, feeling everything clicking into place. That would be over ten years ago now, gah…